Not every affiliate program is sales related.  There are also tons of merchants who will pay affiliates for qualified and legitimate leads.  Pay per lead merchants are some of the best merchants to promote for a variety of reasons - the most important of which is that you can be compensated when your visitor completes an online lead form - the conversion rates are generally much higher because the visitors you refer don’t need to make a purchase to complete the action.. Some of the most popular pay per lead programs include merchants in the insurance, mortgage, and service businesses.

Of course, this comes with some caveats. Merchants will only pay affiliates for qualified AND legitimate leads.  That means that the person you refer not only has to completely fill out the entire form with real data, the lead has to qualify for the Merchant’s service. For example, sending a Michigan-based mortgage provider a lead from Russia isn’t going to get you any cash. That said, it is still much easier to get visitors to fill out a form than to buy something online so, in most cases, pre-selling and converting large numbers of visitors is easier. Of course, because the people you refer aren’t buying anything, the payout for leads are often less than standard affiliate sales percentage, but not always. It’s common to see larger commission numbers in industries like insurance and mortgage loans where the lead means big money for the service provider - keep that in mind when hunting for these types of affiliate programs.

A good place to start looking for affiliate programs with the most lucrative pay-per-lead programs are at larger affiliate networks like Commission Junction and Linkshare, but be on the look out for affiliate programs run right off the merchant’s website. Those are the gems. Also try a quick google search for specific terms like “mortgage lead affiliate program”. You can bet that if there are good pay-per-lead programs on the larger networks that there’ll be a lot of affiliate competition around those programs, so taking the time to find programs that aren’t heavily publicized could pay large dividends in time, effort and income later on.